Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Michael D. Thomas" <mdthomas AT mindspring.com>]

MS has a lot of money in the bank $(40 bil?), and they will probably continue
to use it for high dollar research initiatives and risky business strategies
that require enormous upfront expenditures.

Some efforts will slide on the slippery slope of business ethics --
specifically, the ethics of leveraging the monopoly strengths in one market to
unfairly position in another. Some efforts will stay above and away from said
slope. (Even if you assume that MS is highly unethical, the law of averages
suggest that at least some actions by the company will be ethical. The inverse
is also true.)

Some MS efforts will succeed, some will not.

This article bets that Xbox Live will not succeed and does a good job of
laying out why. Over time, I think it will become more interesting watching MS
compete with big, diversified, global corporations that have been so for
longer.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25367.html

Microsoft habitually announces billion dollar bets that aren't really, but
Xbox Live really is one. That's not to say the stated billions are correct of
course, but if this one flops it'll still cost Redmond a pretty penny.

<snip/>

And it's risky because - as was not the case in the pre-XP hype period -
Microsoft is trying to carve its way into and dominate an entirely new market
that it doesn't already own. As The Register has been known to observe in the
past, Microsoft is actually not very good at this kind of stuff, so don't get
your hopes up (or do, depending on your inclinations).

<snip/>

The key difference between Xbox Live and Sony's version is that Microsoft's is
controlled/closed/paid for, while Sony is going for a looser approach, which
for the moment seems to consist of selling the adaptor, enabling online gaming
then standing back to see what happens. In some senses this means that
Microsoft could view Sony as not competing at all, but the difference does
leave scope for Redmond to suffer an embarrassing self-inflicted defeat. If
Sony's initial experience is good, it will undoubtedly put more muscle behind
online gaming, and will have left itself sufficient room to undercut Microsoft
or just blitz it out of the business with a free service.

<snip/>

Bach "said the company was planning a service that he compared to Disneyland
for its safe, wholesome environment - in contrast to the 'Coney Island' he
said that the open Internet can sometimes become. 'Compare Coney Island to
Disneyland,' he said. 'When you're at Disneyland, there's no trash, no
violence and you never see security. That's what we have in mind.'"

<snip/>